This paper looks at the concept of consociational government (or the principle of fully-fledged power sharing) as it has evolved in recent comparative studies of the politics of divided societies. It describes the stages ...

National identity is symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post conflict situation – Northern ...

This paper considers the impact of borders on employment opportunities or barriers on the island of Ireland. In that context, it is about several senses of “border”: the creation of two borders on the independence of ...

Central to reaching peace and settlement in Northern Ireland was a sequence of British--Irish intergovernmental discussions and negotiations, dating from the beginning of the 1980s. British and Irish state cooperation and ...

The Irish experience of public service reform provides a unique case study of institutional change and resilience, and offers new perspectives on public service reform in “Anglo-Saxon” administrative systems. The data used ...

This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing
bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases
that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both ...

In this paper we analyse a railroad cartel run by the Joint Executive Committee (JEC) in the United States in the nineteenth century. The JEC was a cartel whose members anticipated a periodic fall in demand due to competition ...

In the last twenty years in Ireland, we have witnessed debates - notably about abortion and divorce -
which featured not only radically opposed viewpoints but also significantly different vocabularies.
Many advocates of ...

There has been considerable debate surrounding the nature of the European Union’s international capacity. Early conceptions of the Union as a civilian – or non-military actor – dominated early thinking, characterising the ...

Traditional analyses of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP) tend to characterise it either as an effete and declaratory
expression of lowest common denominator politics or as a limited framework ...

Ireland has had one of the most catastrophic experiences of financial crisis in the developed world, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. Unlike the US or Britain though, Ireland’s enormous banking exposure ...

This paper discusses the best way to deal with difference in the public sphere. The liberal public-private distinction focuses on control and relegates difference to the private. It is subject to the criticism that it is ...

Many theoretical models of transition are driven by the assumption that economic decision making is subject to political constraints. In this paper we empirically test whether the winners and losers of economic reform ...